You're missing half the beauty of the design without grabbing the Toggle CSS Stylesheet favelet/bookmarklet and trying it out on the winning site.
Because of the use of proper HTML structure (Hx, Acronym tags) the site is still is very accessible and easy to read.
A minor quibble is the rampant usage of spans with a class named "none" to hide navigation divider pipes ("|") when CSS is on. Something like an unordered list might be better structurally... but that's more of a personal thing.
You're missing half the beauty of the design without grabbing the Toggle CSS Stylesheet favelet/bookmarklet and trying it out on the winning site.
Because of the use of proper HTML structure (Hx, Acronym tags) the site is still is very accessible and easy to read.
A minor quibble is the rampant usage of spans with a class named "none" to hide navigation divider pipes ("|") when CSS is on. Something like an unordered list might be better structurally... but that's more of a personal thing.
You're missing half the beauty of the design without grabbing the Toggle CSS Stylesheet favelet/bookmarklet and trying it out on the winning site.
Because of the use of proper HTML structure (Hx, Acronym tags) the site is still is very accessible and easy to read.
A minor quibble I have is the rampant usage of spans with a class named "none" to hide navigation divider pipes ("|") when CSS is on. Something like an unordered list might be better structurally... but that's more of a personal thing.
You're missing half the beauty if you don't grab the Toggle CSS Stylesheet bookmarklet/favlet and use it when you check out the winning entry.
Because of all the proper structure in the HTML (like proper usage of Hx, and Acronym tags), it still looks good and is easily readable without the CSS. It even unhides "skip to" links (see Dive Into Accessibility) for easier navigation at the top for non-visual browsers.
My only quibble is the repetitive usage of spans with a class called "none" to hide the navigation dividing pipes ("|") when CSS is enabled. Maybe a structure using unordered lists might read better semantically.
One of the reasons I switched from Netscape Navigator 3 to IE 3 was that when I viewed the source of a website on my local hard drive (ie: testing and debugging), IE would open the actual file in Notepad (or any other editor), while Navigator would open either a non-editable page source window or a cached version of it in Notepad (no, I'm not going to use Composer).
The same is kinda true with IE6 and Moz today. IE6 lets me move around my local prototype website and click on a large Edit button. This simplifies editing static html pages for me.
But hey, I still think Mozilla is great and invaluable for testing and debugging code. The Javascript Console mentioned in the article has saved me tons of time. I totally recommend it as the first thing to use to check for scripting errors.
One final though... IIRC, IE5.0 has had a View Partial Source tool available as part of a powertoy (er, Web Development Accessories) for web developers.
PBS has a very informative website outlining The Merchants of Cool -- "a report on the creators and marketers of popular culture for teens".
But the most eye-opening part is their section on the Media Giants. It has a huge listing of all the holdings and subsidaries of the largest media giants: News Corp, Vivendi Universal, Sony, AOL Time Warner, Walt Disney and Viacom.
Marvel, DC and Image comics (the top 3 mainstream comic producers in North American) have been changing their comics lately.
Marvel has been one of the most proactive companies in revamping their comic lines so that the stories are accessible to the non-collector. They're writen by the best writers and they've used various artists. While the X-Men, Daredevil and Spider-Man movies are fairly okay, the storylines of the comics themselves have grown up and changed to fit the modern times.
For example, the identity of Daredevil in the comic book has been outted in the newspapers. Because of this, we get stories that to look into the media and how it's manipulated, how people in the real world sees heroes and other topics. While there's still a lot of action, it's no longer just the hero fighting an enemy just for the sake of the story.
The same can be said for the revamped lines of Ultimate Spider-Man and the Ultimates. These are great jumping on points for the casual reader. They're available in a bound trade paperback format, so it's really accessible to the non-collector.
Some really good Marvel titles:
The Ultimates This is the best example of a modern revamp of a superhero theme. The writing and art is excellent.
Ultimate Spider-man This is a story of Peter Parker and it's great how the writer always pushes the character into situations he'd hate to be in. The story is amazing, and the characters aren't two dimensional. It makes for an excellent read.
New X-Men It's X-Men, but it looks far beyond the old tired stories of a minority group fighting for the people that hate them. It has a sci-fi edge to it.
There's actually a bunch of free comic books and previews available in Flash format at Marvel's dotcomics website.
That's just Marvel. DC actually owns several imprints including WildStorm, ABC and Vertigo, which released some of the comics listed in the parent post, like Top 10, League of Extraordinary Gentlemen and Lucifer.
A couple of DC great titles I've been reading are :
Y: The Last Man (by DC's Vertigo)
It deals with the consequences of the world-wide death of every man on Earth
Mek (by Wildstorm's Homage Studios)
It's about cybernetics used by youths in the future as a social statement, much like scarification and piercing today.
Global Frequency (by DC's Wildstorm)
The world leaders, who should be the best and brightest, aren't... so the best and the brightest have rallied on to take matters into their own hands.
Hotbot's sister-site is standards-compliant Wired
on
HotBot Returns
·
· Score: 1
If a site displays well on IE but poorly on Mozilla, it is often the case that the designers of the site focused on developing for IE and gave much less thought to being a standards-compliant site.
That's too bad because Hotbot's sister-site, Wired News was developed to be standards-compliant and is even using CSS layouts.
Seeing how Tera Lycos would agree to a huge change like that, when the prevailing nature of most large commerial webpages is just IE compatibility, had given a lot of hope for web standards.
The most probable reason for this step backwards by Tera Lycos was that Wired News web designer, Douglas Bowman, who was responsible for its redesign, stepped down and started his own business.
I don't think you full understand the goals of W3C specs. They're actually aimed towards accessibility.
If you make your site "accessible", you're helping everyone access the content of your site, even if they're using screen readers, have poor eyesight or have a legacy browser such as Netscape 4 or even Mosaic.
Just because it's a "newfangled" CSS layout based website means it's somehow less accessible. In fact, it's the other way around. All your content is still there. If coded properly (proper semantics, and use of structure... not just endless amounts of DIVs with CSS classes), it's even a lot easier for, say, screen readers to use since they'll see the structure (Hn tags, ULs, etc...). That's a lot better than wading through a bunch of TD tags and spacers gifs that are used for layouts. In fact, you should only use table tags for tabular data.
Check out Wired.com for instance. It has a table-less layout. If you remove the CSS (Opera's user pages, or one of many CSS toggle bookmarklets for Moz) all the content remains easy to read and is accessible.
Now is the time to pursue full compliance with W3C specs.
This is different...this Opera thingy is actually doing reformatting of the page, after a full analysis of the layout... Even though I don't know how well this works, it seems like a extremely clever algoritm...
Maybe it's not entirely different or complicated... It seems like Daniel Glazman managed to do this transformation with only javascript dom and css manipulations on Mozilla. In fact, he's made it into a bookmarklet and you just click on it when browsing a page to activate it.
...and to quote him from the page: "Well, sorry to say, but that's not a very big deal. There is nothing magic there and I can prove it right now. Let's write a stylesheet that does most of the job..."
Would you still consider it a monopoly abuse if you knew Microsoft implements the XDocs application using XML?
IIRC, Tim Berners-Lee gave the new MS Office 11 XML implementation a thumbs up.
PDF is to XML, as Acrobat is to XDocs
on
Microsoft takes on PDF
·
· Score: 5, Insightful
...reports on a new Microsoft PDF-killer technology to be included in Office 11, called XDoc
The PDF-killer isn't XDocs. It isn't even new technology.
XDocs is only Microsoft's front-end application for modifying XML (which the original slashdot post never mentioned). XDoc is positioned as a Word-like way of manipulating XML form data (Screenshot).
If anything, XML will be the PDF-killer. Adobe trapped themselves into a corner when they devoted themselves to a proprietary file format instead of using XML. With everyone jumping on the XML bandwagon, no wonder Adobe's stockholders are getting nervous.
Actually, the "League" comic book is a pretty good concept by Alan Moore (Writer of "Watchmen" - arguably one of the best comic books - and the "From Hell" comic books).
It's one of those indepth comic books and draws various literary characters from the Victorian-era. I mean, someone has even posted a panel-by-panel annotation for it. The second series has a martian invasion of earth similar to War of the Worlds.
So we really want this guy to do Akira? I don't know. But that doesn't mean you should dismiss the "League" concept so quickly.
Final thoughts.... Hopefully The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen won't be butchered like the "From Hell" movie. Hmm... IIRC, Sean Connery is going to be Allan Quartermain.
And that's why they should develop a machine that asks the user for their chosen candidate and engraves it into a wooden ball. The unique grain patterns on the ball prevents it from being replaced by a fraudulent ball. This makes the process foolproof, and will undoubtedly be used in other applications in the future.
It woke up the flash community because suddenly these managers who read the 99% Bad article started asking for usable Flash websites. The same thing is needed for websites.
Do you think web site developers choose to use "those little hacks?" The fact of the matter is that clients say "hey, I want that image to be down and to the left a little bit" so you find yourself putting a little invisible GIF image in to get the position right. You would love to do it "to standards" but if you use layers then it doesn't work for a good proportion of your visitors. Alternatively of course you could do all your work twice, once with "little hacks" for the older browsers and once again "to standards", but most of us like to take a more pragmatic approach.
Well, if you coded to standards the first place (with CSS, try relative positioning, and define the "left" attribute by how many pixels to the left you want it to be) it would look great with Mozilla, IE4-IE6 and Opera 5-6. All other older browsers will still see the image. On the other hand, all future browsers will render the image correctly.
All this "invisible GIF" stuff is deprecated. There's already webstandard solutions to tables, invisible gifs and the like...
No. It's about informing the public about the dangers of having proprietary code in their websites. Sure, the headline is a sensational, but that seemed to work with Jakob Nielsen's Flash: 99% Bad, which practically woke up the whole Flash community to making more usable Flash objects in websites.
We needed a similar wake up in regards to websites.
What do developers mean by "backward compatibility?" They mean using non-standard, proprietary (or deprecated) markup and code to ensure that every visitor has the same experience, whether they're sporting Netscape Navigator 1.0 or IE6. Held up as a Holy Grail of professional development practice, "backward compatibility" sounds good in theory. But the cost is too high and the practice has always been based on a lie.
Proprietary code and those little hacks are bad. Code to standards.
When you paste text in an Office XP application, a small Paste Option smart tag icon appears near (but not in the way of) the pasted item.
Hover over it, and it gives you quick access to change the formatting, such as: - keep source formatting - match destination formatting - keep text only - apply style or formatting
Match destination formatting would have changed the pasted item's text to look like the current style at the insertion point.
It's a smart (and dare I say, innovative) way of solving the problem.
"It wouldn't be tech journalism without at least one misguided soundbyte. News.com quotes the opinion of a systems architect from Clearwater, Florida, who says 'Opera... would do better to support [Microsoft] technologies rather than... industry standards.'
In fact, Microsoft, along with Opera's other larger competitors, has made a point of supporting the industry standard DOM. To stay viable, Opera must do likewise. That they plan to do so soon is very good news. We're guessing the quotation was taken out of context."
In the relatively recent JLA comic story arc writen by Mark Waid, called "Tower of Babel", a villain breaks into Batman's secret logs of all his teammates and uses it to systematically defeat every member of the Justice League of America.
Batman never talked about himself in the JLA, but often coaxed little pieces of information from his teammates. He secretly worked on "protocols" for defeating them. Batman made sure he could stop any of the JLA, and he thought they were foolish if they weren't doing the same.
His tactics:
Aquaman - Made him fear water, which he needs to live. Green Lantern - Blinded him, leaving him unable to create anything with his ring Flash - Created a vibration bullet that doesn't phase through the Flash, leaving him subjected to light speed epileptic seizures. Wonder Woman - Subjected her to a virtual unending combat. Martian Manhunter - Created nanites that embed themselves to his skin, making him a human flame (with fire being his weakness) Plastic Man - Froze and shattered him
and of course...
Superman - Synthesized a red kryptonite, which left Superman in tremendous pain.
While Batman wasn't the one to use these tactics, his friends felt betrayed, cheated and physically scarred.
CSS is for separating structure from presentation
on
Return of the WaSP
·
· Score: 4, Informative
Abstraction breaks all that geometric structure, and the geometric structure is what the user sees.
With proper HTML and CSS use, the abstraction at the presentation level doesn't actually break the structure. It merely seperates presentation from structure, while keeping structure together with the content/data.
"...this illustrates a common misunderstanding about CSS. CSS is for separating structure, not content, from the presentation. Markup is meant to give meaningful structure to content. The content can come from a database or text files; the structure from page templates, a CMS or XSL transformation. Keeping your content free of meaningless structural elements allows you to pour your content into another structure suitable for different devices. CSS allows you to apply client-appropriate and easily-varied visual style to that structured output, without having to alter your markup."
Use CSS to create 3-columned tableless layouts
on
Return of the WaSP
·
· Score: 5, Informative
It's totally possible to create great looking tableless, liquid, three-column layout using CSS.
These sites have different tutorials for various column combinations and even backwards compatibility with Netscape 4.
The beauty of not using tables is that you're seperating structure from presentation. Basically, around some content, you specify what it is (structure). In the case of Slashdot's side navigation, in the XHTML/HTML you'd might surround the content with a DIV tag and give it an id/class of "sidenavigation".
With tables, you're already forced to predetermine that you want to use it on the left column when you mark up the whole table in TD and TR tags.
So how's CSS better than tables? Well, once you've defined the structure in XHTML/HTML, you can use CSS to define the presentation to say, I want anything tagged as a "sidenavigation" to be a vertical box on the left side that's X pixels wide.
This presentation can be easily be altered by changing the CSS. You can tell CSS to move things to the right, maybe center it or whatever. And you can define a CSS specifically for handhelds. You can tell it to hide data, change font sizes, redefine colors, or anything you want. For the sight-impared, you could define the CSS to display it all in a simple, column-less layout. And since you have not predetermined the presentation in the HTML, the user could have defined their own stylesheets to override your CSS to present the content in the way they want it.
With HTML and CSS (and also the XML and XSLT recommendations), websites can be so much more flexible.
IIRC, I thought the Gecko layout engine was fairly good several years back already and people were already using the source for their own web browser projects.
If the goal of the Mozilla org was to solely create a browser, I think they would have finished a lot faster. However, that was not the goal, and a lot of the time and effort was spent turning Mozilla into a viable development platform.
Slashdot Mirror
You're missing half the beauty of the design without grabbing the Toggle CSS Stylesheet favelet/bookmarklet and trying it out on the winning site.
Because of the use of proper HTML structure (Hx, Acronym tags) the site is still is very accessible and easy to read.
A minor quibble is the rampant usage of spans with a class named "none" to hide navigation divider pipes ("|") when CSS is on. Something like an unordered list might be better structurally... but that's more of a personal thing.
You're missing half the beauty of the design without grabbing the Toggle CSS Stylesheet favelet/bookmarklet and trying it out on the winning site.
Because of the use of proper HTML structure (Hx, Acronym tags) the site is still is very accessible and easy to read.
A minor quibble is the rampant usage of spans with a class named "none" to hide navigation divider pipes ("|") when CSS is on. Something like an unordered list might be better structurally... but that's more of a personal thing.
You're missing half the beauty of the design without grabbing the Toggle CSS Stylesheet favelet/bookmarklet and trying it out on the winning site.
Because of the use of proper HTML structure (Hx, Acronym tags) the site is still is very accessible and easy to read.
A minor quibble I have is the rampant usage of spans with a class named "none" to hide navigation divider pipes ("|") when CSS is on. Something like an unordered list might be better structurally... but that's more of a personal thing.
You're missing half the beauty if you don't grab the Toggle CSS Stylesheet bookmarklet/favlet and use it when you check out the winning entry.
Because of all the proper structure in the HTML (like proper usage of Hx, and Acronym tags), it still looks good and is easily readable without the CSS. It even unhides "skip to" links (see Dive Into Accessibility) for easier navigation at the top for non-visual browsers.
My only quibble is the repetitive usage of spans with a class called "none" to hide the navigation dividing pipes ("|") when CSS is enabled. Maybe a structure using unordered lists might read better semantically.
How about Phallus? I don't think anyone else will fight for that project name.
I hope.
One of the reasons I switched from Netscape Navigator 3 to IE 3 was that when I viewed the source of a website on my local hard drive (ie: testing and debugging), IE would open the actual file in Notepad (or any other editor), while Navigator would open either a non-editable page source window or a cached version of it in Notepad (no, I'm not going to use Composer).
The same is kinda true with IE6 and Moz today. IE6 lets me move around my local prototype website and click on a large Edit button. This simplifies editing static html pages for me.
But hey, I still think Mozilla is great and invaluable for testing and debugging code. The Javascript Console mentioned in the article has saved me tons of time. I totally recommend it as the first thing to use to check for scripting errors.
One final though... IIRC, IE5.0 has had a View Partial Source tool available as part of a powertoy (er, Web Development Accessories) for web developers.
(From PBS's Merchants of Cool)
PBS has a very informative website outlining The Merchants of Cool -- "a report on the creators and marketers of popular culture for teens".
But the most eye-opening part is their section on the Media Giants. It has a huge listing of all the holdings and subsidaries of the largest media giants: News Corp, Vivendi Universal, Sony, AOL Time Warner, Walt Disney and Viacom.
Check out AOL Time Warner, for instance.
Marvel has been one of the most proactive companies in revamping their comic lines so that the stories are accessible to the non-collector. They're writen by the best writers and they've used various artists. While the X-Men, Daredevil and Spider-Man movies are fairly okay, the storylines of the comics themselves have grown up and changed to fit the modern times. For example, the identity of Daredevil in the comic book has been outted in the newspapers. Because of this, we get stories that to look into the media and how it's manipulated, how people in the real world sees heroes and other topics. While there's still a lot of action, it's no longer just the hero fighting an enemy just for the sake of the story.
The same can be said for the revamped lines of Ultimate Spider-Man and the Ultimates. These are great jumping on points for the casual reader. They're available in a bound trade paperback format, so it's really accessible to the non-collector.
Some really good Marvel titles:
This is the best example of a modern revamp of a superhero theme. The writing and art is excellent.
This is a story of Peter Parker and it's great how the writer always pushes the character into situations he'd hate to be in. The story is amazing, and the characters aren't two dimensional. It makes for an excellent read.
It's X-Men, but it looks far beyond the old tired stories of a minority group fighting for the people that hate them. It has a sci-fi edge to it.
There's actually a bunch of free comic books and previews available in Flash format at Marvel's dotcomics website.
That's just Marvel. DC actually owns several imprints including WildStorm, ABC and Vertigo, which released some of the comics listed in the parent post, like Top 10, League of Extraordinary Gentlemen and Lucifer.
A couple of DC great titles I've been reading are :
It deals with the consequences of the world-wide death of every man on Earth
It's about cybernetics used by youths in the future as a social statement, much like scarification and piercing today.
The world leaders, who should be the best and brightest, aren't... so the best and the brightest have rallied on to take matters into their own hands.
Seeing how Tera Lycos would agree to a huge change like that, when the prevailing nature of most large commerial webpages is just IE compatibility, had given a lot of hope for web standards.
The most probable reason for this step backwards by Tera Lycos was that Wired News web designer, Douglas Bowman, who was responsible for its redesign, stepped down and started his own business.
I don't think you full understand the goals of W3C specs. They're actually aimed towards accessibility.
If you make your site "accessible", you're helping everyone access the content of your site, even if they're using screen readers, have poor eyesight or have a legacy browser such as Netscape 4 or even Mosaic.
Just because it's a "newfangled" CSS layout based website means it's somehow less accessible. In fact, it's the other way around. All your content is still there. If coded properly (proper semantics, and use of structure... not just endless amounts of DIVs with CSS classes), it's even a lot easier for, say, screen readers to use since they'll see the structure (Hn tags, ULs, etc...). That's a lot better than wading through a bunch of TD tags and spacers gifs that are used for layouts. In fact, you should only use table tags for tabular data.
Check out Wired.com for instance. It has a table-less layout. If you remove the CSS (Opera's user pages, or one of many CSS toggle bookmarklets for Moz) all the content remains easy to read and is accessible.
Now is the time to pursue full compliance with W3C specs.
Maybe it's not entirely different or complicated... It seems like Daniel Glazman managed to do this transformation with only javascript dom and css manipulations on Mozilla. In fact, he's made it into a bookmarklet and you just click on it when browsing a page to activate it.
...and to quote him from the page: "Well, sorry to say, but that's not a very big deal. There is nothing magic there and I can prove it right now. Let's write a stylesheet that does most of the job..."
Would you still consider it a monopoly abuse if you knew Microsoft implements the XDocs application using XML?
IIRC, Tim Berners-Lee gave the new MS Office 11 XML implementation a thumbs up.
XDocs is only Microsoft's front-end application for modifying XML (which the original slashdot post never mentioned). XDoc is positioned as a Word-like way of manipulating XML form data (Screenshot).
If anything, XML will be the PDF-killer. Adobe trapped themselves into a corner when they devoted themselves to a proprietary file format instead of using XML. With everyone jumping on the XML bandwagon, no wonder Adobe's stockholders are getting nervous.
Actually, the "League" comic book is a pretty good concept by Alan Moore (Writer of "Watchmen" - arguably one of the best comic books - and the "From Hell" comic books).
It's one of those indepth comic books and draws various literary characters from the Victorian-era. I mean, someone has even posted a panel-by-panel annotation for it. The second series has a martian invasion of earth similar to War of the Worlds.
So we really want this guy to do Akira? I don't know. But that doesn't mean you should dismiss the "League" concept so quickly.
Final thoughts.... Hopefully The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen won't be butchered like the "From Hell" movie. Hmm... IIRC, Sean Connery is going to be Allan Quartermain.
And that's why they should develop a machine that asks the user for their chosen candidate and engraves it into a wooden ball. The unique grain patterns on the ball prevents it from being replaced by a fraudulent ball. This makes the process foolproof, and will undoubtedly be used in other applications in the future.
Well, if you coded to standards the first place (with CSS, try relative positioning, and define the "left" attribute by how many pixels to the left you want it to be) it would look great with Mozilla, IE4-IE6 and Opera 5-6. All other older browsers will still see the image. On the other hand, all future browsers will render the image correctly.
All this "invisible GIF" stuff is deprecated. There's already webstandard solutions to tables, invisible gifs and the like...
When you paste text in an Office XP application, a small Paste Option smart tag icon appears near (but not in the way of) the pasted item.
Hover over it, and it gives you quick access to change the formatting, such as:
- keep source formatting
- match destination formatting
- keep text only
- apply style or formatting
Match destination formatting would have changed the pasted item's text to look like the current style at the insertion point.
It's a smart (and dare I say, innovative) way of solving the problem.
And since when does "News for Nerds, Stuff that Matters" exclusively equal to a computer geek?
In the relatively recent JLA comic story arc writen by Mark Waid, called "Tower of Babel", a villain breaks into Batman's secret logs of all his teammates and uses it to systematically defeat every member of the Justice League of America.
Batman never talked about himself in the JLA, but often coaxed little pieces of information from his teammates. He secretly worked on "protocols" for defeating them. Batman made sure he could stop any of the JLA, and he thought they were foolish if they weren't doing the same.
His tactics:
Aquaman - Made him fear water, which he needs to live.
Green Lantern - Blinded him, leaving him unable to create anything with his ring
Flash - Created a vibration bullet that doesn't phase through the Flash, leaving him subjected to light speed epileptic seizures.
Wonder Woman - Subjected her to a virtual unending combat.
Martian Manhunter - Created nanites that embed themselves to his skin, making him a human flame (with fire being his weakness)
Plastic Man - Froze and shattered him
and of course...
Superman - Synthesized a red kryptonite, which left Superman in tremendous pain.
While Batman wasn't the one to use these tactics, his friends felt betrayed, cheated and physically scarred.
With proper HTML and CSS use, the abstraction at the presentation level doesn't actually break the structure. It merely seperates presentation from structure, while keeping structure together with the content/data.
Scott Andrew said it best here:
"...this illustrates a common misunderstanding about CSS. CSS is for separating structure, not content, from the presentation. Markup is meant to give meaningful structure to content. The content can come from a database or text files; the structure from page templates, a CMS or XSL transformation. Keeping your content free of meaningless structural elements allows you to pour your content into another structure suitable for different devices. CSS allows you to apply client-appropriate and easily-varied visual style to that structured output, without having to alter your markup."
It's totally possible to create great looking tableless, liquid, three-column layout using CSS.
o script.htm
These sites have different tutorials for various column combinations and even backwards compatibility with Netscape 4.
http://www.glish.com/css
http://www.saila.com/usage/layouts
http://homepage.mac.com/realworldstyle
http://www.projectseven.com/whims/cssp_3box/3boxn
The beauty of not using tables is that you're seperating structure from presentation. Basically, around some content, you specify what it is (structure). In the case of Slashdot's side navigation, in the XHTML/HTML you'd might surround the content with a DIV tag and give it an id/class of "sidenavigation".
With tables, you're already forced to predetermine that you want to use it on the left column when you mark up the whole table in TD and TR tags.
So how's CSS better than tables? Well, once you've defined the structure in XHTML/HTML, you can use CSS to define the presentation to say, I want anything tagged as a "sidenavigation" to be a vertical box on the left side that's X pixels wide.
This presentation can be easily be altered by changing the CSS. You can tell CSS to move things to the right, maybe center it or whatever. And you can define a CSS specifically for handhelds. You can tell it to hide data, change font sizes, redefine colors, or anything you want. For the sight-impared, you could define the CSS to display it all in a simple, column-less layout. And since you have not predetermined the presentation in the HTML, the user could have defined their own stylesheets to override your CSS to present the content in the way they want it.
With HTML and CSS (and also the XML and XSLT recommendations), websites can be so much more flexible.
IIRC, I thought the Gecko layout engine was fairly good several years back already and people were already using the source for their own web browser projects.
If the goal of the Mozilla org was to solely create a browser, I think they would have finished a lot faster. However, that was not the goal, and a lot of the time and effort was spent turning Mozilla into a viable development platform.